Eldergays. What are some things you thought were so much fun that the youngsters today would go, huh?

Kids today run through sprinklers.

Riding bikes with friends all around the neighbourhood all day unsupervised!

Fucking.

Going clubbing, having sex.

Allowing somebody else to have their own opinion that might in some tiny degree not match your own.

Diving into a swimming pool fully clothed.

prank calls in the days before caller id and call block.

Dialing the phone with a pencil

Cave wall paintings.

Brontosaurus barbecues.

Playing with the wheel, back when there was just the one.

R9 = Olivia de Havilland

Playing board games and card games -and word games. No batteries! The goal of playing wasn't to kill each other...

Monopoly

Building forts in the woods

Building dangerous forts and tree houses in the woods unsupervised by helicopter parents.

Slave auctions.

Monkey bars and merry-go-rounds at the local parks...lots of falls and knee scrapes. No way "monkey bars" *wouldn't* be cancelled these days...they'd be rechristened something very blah. Metal slides as well...lots of burns from those in the summer.

Fayetteville, NC is finna tear down your market house, r14. Better stand out there and guard it. Did I mention there’s rain forecast all next week?

flying a kites.

Paper dolls.

[quote] flying a kites.

A egg.

Listening to stacks of 45 rpm singles.

Being gang banged by neighborhood boys

Leaving the house exploring the neighborhood all alone in the woods and not coming home until dark without a cell phone, GPS or any communication device when I was 8 years old.

Having rich Republican friends and lovers.

Reading books instead of shit on DL.

Masturbation parties

[quote] Playing board games and card games -and word games. No batteries! The goal of playing wasn't to kill each other...

Don't forget about dice games ... Yahtzee!

Those wooden paddles that had a ball attached

Etch-A-Sketch

Those games with the little silver balls in them that you had to tilt until they were in the hole

Candy cigarettes

The company they sent me out here to work for had several game rooms. I got into once again doing puzzles and board games which was a nice way for me and my roommate to while away time under lockdown. Sketching too.

Real cigarettes.

Drinking and smoking all night followed by fast food to cure hangover.

Going to school without having to worry about whether you were going to end up dead.

I remember my grandmother's frequent pastime was to simply sit and look out the window of her Brooklyn apartment.

Listening on on party lines.

Playing with my father's iron lung.

One of the few things I miss from long ago is the old pinball machines. I mean the old wooden ones with bells and the electric bumpers, I was pretty good at making a quarter last. I'd love to find an old pinball parlor like the one near my old job in the 70s.

[quote] Drinking and smoking all night followed by fast food to cure hangover.

Yes, that was a very solid combo of activities. Except, I never got hangovers in those days. I either puked or went to sleep. Either way, I woke up feeling OK. Fast food was eaten for enjoyment purposes only, e.g., Jack in the Box bacon cheeseburger.

Taking a jitney, then a bus (long before BART) alone into San Francisco and wandering around the City all day. It was thrilling and I felt so adult. I was 10.

Speaking to each other face-to-face with neither one having a phone in hand.

Smoking withy kindergarten teacher

Riding those bikes with those big front wheels.

Listening to my little transistor radio

Pac Man, Asteroid, MTV, VH1, Playing records

Buying candy ... and then eating candy. Candy seems so expensive now compared to back then.

Going to a drive-in theatre in your footie pajamas and falling asleep during the movie after eating all the food from the concession stand. Those hamburgers in foil wrappers with dehydrated onions were delicious.

Smoking marijuana, hopefully not getting paranoid, then eating snacks. The best is when you had the foresight to shop in advance for your snacks. That way, you didn't have to go into the store all paranoid that somebody just knows you're stoned out of your mind. Snacks must include something salty (e.g., Cheetos puffs) and something sweet (e.g., 1-lb. bar of Hershey chocolate).

As a prank...I would yell "Land! Land!" every 3 hours while on the Mayflower....

Smoking in the smoking lounge at the college library, cramming out a paper onto notecards. Taking it all back to the dorm and typing it up all night. Learning how to write cohesively and correctly in 1 or 2 passes, tops.

Smoking in seedy art cinemas.

Going to Paris and Barcelona to eat drink smoke dance fuck. Staying in cheap hotels which were everywhere and spending veery little to continue to eat drink smoke dance and fuck day after day, week after week. Maybe read in Paris, too.

R48 somehow we went to Paris a lot during my college days. Smoked and drank like nobody’s business. Sounds gross now, but it was fantastic then. Everybody smoked, we stayed in one star hotels and played in the streets of Paris. Different times.

Flashlight Tag! Kickball! Catching Fireflies!

Playing hopscotch, jacks and badminton.

Yes, somehow, jacks was really fun.

I grew up in a suburban wooded neighborhood. We'd play WAR! We had no idea about WWII, but we were on the lookout for Nazi's, who we saw on TV shows in the 60's. Nazi's were the bad guys.

Skedding. If the roads were icy you'd sneak up to a car stopped at a light and you would squat down and hang onto the rear bumper, taking yourself for a ride when the light changed. Dress shoes without any kind of tread were the best for this.

Our WAR was -

cowboys and Indians

nazis and Americans

soviets and Americans

Godzilla and his monster team vs humans

occasionally - girls vs boys - most girls didn't want to play war but it happened sometimes. We also has a game not in the woods, rather in yards, called "war" which was with a ball. It was some kind of mixture of dodgeball and football. Anyone?

Some children's parks have fountains that are like a sprinkler, looks like fun.

Riding the buckboard to Hinkley to buy sarsaparilla and pickles from a barrel. Mama always told me to not let my lips linger too long over the pickle.

Oh yeah: Viewmaster - LOVED it as a kid. My kid thought it was sad! Same with the Superman movie. How can you not like Superman and Superman II with Christopher Reeve?!

Riding full barrel on your bike down a steep hill concrete street, wiping out, scraping the hell out of our knees, and doing it again. Cool!

Having a stranger ask for your number at bar and writing it on a napkin. Checking the answering machine at home after you’ve been gone all day and having a message from him. I think being available all the time via text/social media/apps etc takes some of the anticipation away.

R59, yes especially on the bikes with the rear brakes.

Oh the anticipation R60. Did he call??? Rush home from work to see if the red light is blinking.

r60 r62 Here's your favorite song.

Simon. Merlin. Weebles. Speak 'n Spell. Lite Brite. Operation. MasterMind. Star Wars cards. Kermit puppet.

Clackers

Magna Doodle

Lite Brite

R59 when I was about nine I rode on the handlebars of a friends' bike down a steep hill which had a small bridge over a creek at the bottom. Just was we got to the bridge a delivery van crossed over and we had to ditch into the driveway of a house and I hit the gravel drive and my friend hit the lawn.

Riding in a tank-type car with someone who recently got his driver's license. Bunch of teenagers packed into car, hoping it wouldn't break down and end up on the side of the road.

Snorkelling or diving for our dinner.

Changing in and out of swimsuits in the one-room lake change room with all my friends' dads.

Using my tape recorder to secretly record conversations then playing them back to the people I recorded and hilarity ensues.

Putting silly putty over comics and stretching putty to make transferred image fat or skinny (does not work anymore)

Watching slinkys walk down stairs (again - does not work anymore)

I guess you didn’t grow up in a Mafia family, R70.

Coming home and finding that the Sears Christmas catalog had arrived in the mail.

Skateboards and roller skates with metal wheels.

Hitchhiking.

Rope jumping with the girls, with special songs and chants.

Hula hoops.

Trying LSD - yes, this was a thing.

Making prank phone calls in the summer when school was out and parents weren't around.

Dodgeball, kickball, tetherball

Going around in the summer with your friends who were also out of school, with no plans, no check ins with parents. You left the house in the morning when the group showed up at your house to see if you were home and could come out. You came back for dinner around dusk. Your parents had no idea what you’d done all day. There might be a newt in your pocket or a toad or some firecrackers or dirty mini comics. Our a scary 70s tract booklet that everyone read that said we were all going to hell and we would laugh and laugh but then when alone we’d worry about the tract.

Crackerjack

OP, why would you think kids today don’t run through sprinklers??

Honestly, some of you are just old, bitter and out of touch, constantly looking for things to judge everyone else for.

Choking hazard toy prizes inside breakfast cereal boxes.

Smoking at Tim Hortons

Lawn darts with real metal points. Just the right element of danger. Smelling the DDT in the alleys after a big mosquito spray. Department store catalogs with men's underwear sections.

Passing cuneiform notes on stone tablets to my best friend during class. Such fun!

I love the advances video games have made on home consoles.

But gathering around arcades with actual friends in your own city to play the originals was a special brand of fun we've completely lost.

Arcades were also a good place to cruise for dick and buy weed.

A lot of these bring back great memories!

R46 I always joke that my local 7-11 (they all probably do this) have all the JUMBO sized candy bars, Snickers, Twix, Reese's PB Cups etc. at the checkout counter. I call it "Stoner Size" candy.

R79 Remember when it was fun when people didn't get triggered over the silliest things? Remember that?

Playing stoop ball or street hockey...stopping play when a car came down the street.

Going away for the summer to a place with no television and only two movie theaters in town. Running around all day unsupervised.

Changing into your swimsuit in one big room with the other kids in camp and with the college aged counselors.

Playing War and Man Hunt.

Visits to the public library

Sticker books. Spirograph. ColorForms.

Getting wacky stickers in Wonder bread! We used to put them on the fridge in the 70s

Collecting Archie comics. I really loved Little Archie and the mini digests

I recall collecting the little comics inside individually wrapped pieces of Bazooka bubble gum and redeeming them in for prizes. There was shipping and handling of 25 cents or 50 cents which was a big deal to me at the time.

Do kids these days still toilet-paper people's houses in the middle of the night?

I haven't lived in the suburbs for 25 years, so I don't know. My teenage friends and I would stay up all night watching Freddy Krueger movies, then toilet paper houses or meet up with girls in the middle of the night. Some tire-slashing and doorbell ditching occurred as well.

I think I saw a house toilet-papered on Halloween in recent years, but I fear it's a lost art / vandalism.

Kids find almost anything fun. That’s what’s so great about them.

Yes, r73, even I liked the Sears Catalog, though my childhood was long after its heyday.

That is how my Mom correctly identified what I wanted for Christmas, i.e. Star Wars action figures, Transformers or G.I. Joe toys.

One year I got the Jabba the Hutt and Jabba's Dungeon playsets from the Sears Catalog!

Saving your allowance and walking downtown with a bunch of friends to the record store to buy an Album, stopping for an ice cream sundae, then going to one of our houses to listen to the album for the first time. We'd all pass around the cover and admire the album art. Also we would make cassette tape copies (which were horrible in quality) to give out. I remember the Beatles White Album, Beach Boys Endless Summer, The Who Tommy Soundtrack, The Cars.....

[quote] Kids find almost anything fun. That’s what’s so great about them.

Unless they get "bored" with their 10,000 toys. Then they should STFU and handle it (the boredom).

R96 lovely. Good, clean, fun.

Riding around in the family station wagon and playing in the back and not wearing safety belts. Riding bicycles all over the place and never wearing helmets. The whole building forts in the trees with discarded wood found at local house building construction sites chilling out there and adults never saying anything. Going skinny dipping once in the pool at the YMCA summer camp and all the boys going crazy and horsing around because of the freedom of not having to wear a suit. Even the teenage counselors having a great time being naked and laughing.

[quote] Do kids these days still toilet-paper people's houses in the middle of the night?

Not these days! If anyone TPs my house I request Charmin Ultra Strong.

The internet, smart phones and social media really killed a lot of innocent fun.

There was a lot of joy growing up wit so much freedom. Did we sometimes get hurt? Of course. Did we do completely stupid stuff? Of course. But that was the fun of it all.

MAD magazine. Around senior year of high school, graduated to National Lampoon.

I accidentally damaged (I swear it was an accident!) my cousin's Chewing Gum Wrapper Chain, she gave me quite the beat down. She would spend hours on that thing and they were some kind of status symbol as to how long yours was, lol.

The scent of all those flavors, Juicy Fruit, Fruit Stripe, Teaberry, Doublemint, Black Jack, Beeman's, Clove and more, fun to sniff those chains.

Tricking an unsuspecting friend into a snipe hunt in Scouts.

[quote]Did we do completely stupid stuff? Of course. But that was the fun of it all.

And we did stupid stuff without having to worry that it would get posted to social media and live forever and ever on the Internet.

Playing Simon Says or Giant Step on the lawn until the street lights came on.

Going to the corner drugstore to buy candy for my older brother - here's 35¢, get me a pack of SweeTarts, some Bazooka bubble gum and a Clark Bar, and get something for yourself with the change.

Changing out of my wet bathing suit at the State Park beach bathhouse, facing the naked men rinsing off in the open showers a few feet away.

Drugged out raves!!

When we were teens, on hot summer nights, we would pile into the bed of our friends' truck and cruise up and down Van Nuys and Ventura Blvds, flicking our cigarette ashes and tossing cigarette butts out into the open, and catcalling pretty little things on the streets or in their cars.

/friend's

Smoking marijuana out of all different kinds of fun devices. IMO, the power hitter was the best and least wasteful device. (Big plastic squeeze bottle, you stuck a lit joint into the cap (facing into the bottle), squeezed the bottle, and voila, a concentrated hit.) Smoke was not lost into the air. All was contained in the bottle.

Similarly, snorting coke (not injecting, there were limits) out of interesting devices. IMO, the best and most discreet was the cocaine one-hitter or bullet device. A little bottle with a bullet-shaped cap. The cap could rotate and you could load a hit into the cap (from the bottle). Then, you could rotate the loaded cap upwards and, voila, a hit that was ready to snort discreetly. No messy lines laid out for all to see.

Attaching playing cards with clothespins to bicycle wheel spokes. Many Schwinn owners were into it !

Playing with my pet Dung Beetle. Before eating it.

A group of us would camp out in the woods with a fire, much like in Stand By Me. If the next day was hot we'd go to a swimming hole.

Getting out a magnifying glass on a sunny day and burning paper and ants.

Looking at stuff under a microscope. Just strands of hair were interesting.

Red Rover,Red Rover, we call ( Mary ) over !

Kick the Can!

I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Segregated drinking fountains and lunch counters.

Listening to a transistor radio in bed at night.

[quote] Kids today run through sprinklers.

I am on Twitter and TikTok 22 hours a day and I never see Gen Z running through sprinklers!

Hay rack rides.

TikTok is Chinese spyware. You should delete it and change all your logins recovery clues.

r107 The absolute best.

R111 my inhaler works like that. Not as much fun, though.

LOL

Did they TP houses before the pandemic?

Finding a dead clown in the woods.

Docking

Staying at the public pool till closing time when all the dads would go to the locker rooms and change into their street clothes.

Converging on the mysterious obelisk while “Also Sprach Zarathustra” blared in the background.

Grammar, OP.

Privacy.

R7 I was the king (queen is more like it) of prank phone calls when I was a pre-teen. I was an only child and spent a fair amount of time alone so I had to get my kicks somehow, even if it was at others expense. I remember entertaining myself for hours on end lying on my bed making scandalous, profane yet absurdly funny phone calls using my slim-line Guess neon landline phone.

Trick or treating. Walking your neighborhood *without your parents* (fast-paced to maximize haul), knocking on doors, and getting free candy from neighbors. Maybe "tour" a haunted house or two. Yes, there were fears of needles in Milky Ways and cocaine in Pixy Stix (really, who would waste coke in this way). Going home, sorting through your candies like Midas, etc.

No such thing as car trunk, parking lot trick or treating.

It's funny you say that R127, they used to use the gang shower after the pool too!

I made an appearance in the shower many, many times